Marketing Wednesday

Today's topic: Bloghops

First off, I encourage you to join as many bloghops as you can. When I had the time to do so I did and I can tell you because of these hops I met some amazing people, formed new friendships and watched my number of followers grow. It is the best way to become a part of the huge community here in the blogosphere. However, if you join a bloghop with the hope of gaining followers and not taking the time to hop from blog to blog, please just don't join. That is not the purpose of a hop, it is an added bonus.

A bloghop is also a great way to help promote your book. There are so many ways you can spin this to relate to your book and to get people talking about it. This is where you need to be creative.

A bloghop I participated in last year wasn't about promoting a book but it could have easily been. So I'm going to use that as an example. The hop was called Oh those High School Dances Bloghop hosted by Kelley Lynn and Emily R King.  The rule was to post a picture from a high school dance and talk about it. If one of them had a book that revolved around a high school dance this would have been perfect.

The original post could have included a synopsis of the book maybe an excerpt to show how the hop relates, giving insight to the story and the main character. As well as the rules and what the category/categories are for winning. From their you get people to sign up. The prizes could have been the book the hop revolved around. Anything that would have related to the book in anyway. Say the girl in the book was obsessed with Sharpie markers, one of the prizes could've been a variety pack of Sharpies. Or book swag made just for the book. The ideas are as limitless as your imagination.

In order to spread the word about your hop, create a badge, which can be done in PowerPoint, Photoshop or any similar program. I have a few I participated in and one I hosted with Cortney Pearson posted on the right side of my blog. All of which if you click will bring you to that particular hop.

Have friends post it on their blogs linking back to yours. Tweet about it. Write about it on Facebook. A few steps to spread the word and it will continue to spread without you doing anything else. 

As the host of the bloghop you have to make sure to make it to every blog that participates and leave a comment. Don't leave a generic comment either. Read their post and write a thoughtful note, including a thank you for participating. And follow back.

Do you participate in bloghops?  What has been your favorite so far?